A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking (I listened to it on tape on a drive to the Dallas CSICOP conference in 1992)

Universal Foam, Sidney Perkowitz

Vermeer's Camera, Philip Steadman

The Code Book, Simon Singh

The Elements of Murder, John Emsley

*Soul Made Flesh, Carl Zimmer (I'm currently reading this)

Time's Arrow, Martin Amis

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, George Johnson

Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman

Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter

The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, Lisa Jardine

A Matter of Degrees, Gino Segre

The Physics of Star Trek, Lawrence Krauss

E=mc<2>, David Bodanis

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, Charles Seife

Absolute Zero: The Conquest of Cold, Tom Shachtman

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, Janna Levin

Warped Passages, Lisa Randall

Apollo's Fire, Michael Sims

Flatland, Edward Abbott

Fermat's Last Theorem, Amir Aczel

Stiff, Mary Roach

Astroturf, M.G. Lord

The Periodic Table, Primo Levi

Longitude, Dava Sobel

The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg

The Mummy Congress, Heather Pringle

The Accelerating Universe, Mario Livio

Math and the Mona Lisa, Bulent Atalay

This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin

The Executioner's Current, Richard Moran

Krakatoa, Simon Winchester

Pythagorus' Trousers, Margaret Wertheim

Neuromancer, William Gibson

The Physics of Superheroes, James Kakalios

The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump, Sandra Hempel

Another Day in the Frontal Lobe, Katrina Firlik

Einstein's Clocks and Poincare's Maps, Peter Galison

The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan

The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins

The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker

An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears

Consilience, E.O. Wilson

Wonderful Life, Stephen J. Gould (haven't read this, but I've read all of his books of collected Natural History articles)

Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard

Fire in the Brain, Ronald K. Siegel

The Life of a Cell, Lewis Thomas

Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Timothy Ferris

Storm World, Chris Mooney

The Carbon Age, Eric Roston

The Black Hole Wars, Leonard Susskind

Copenhagen, Michael Frayn

From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne

Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson

Chaos, James Gleick

Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos

The Physics of NASCAR, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky

Subtle is the Lord, Abraham Pais

I'd add some Oliver Sacks and A.R. Luria (neuroscience case studies), V.S. Ramachandran's A Brief Tour of Consciousness, Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, and some philosophy of science like Larry Laudan's Science and Relativism (nicely written in the form of a dialogue between advocates of different views), Philip Kitcher's The Advancement of Science, Thomas Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution, John Losee's A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, and Ian Hacking's Representing and Intervening. There are lots more to list, but those are a few that I've read. My science reading has leaned very strongly towards cognitive psychology, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science, which is only weakly represented on the above list, and on the creation/evolution debate, which isn't really represented on the above list at all, except by Darwin himself.

Now John Lynch can tell me that I really need to read Origin of Species.

12 comments:

I've got a gorgeous Barnes and Noble HC edition of all five of Darwin's books that I've been meaning to read but haven't gotten around to yet ... I'm pretty sure I read Voyage of the Beagle in the 7th grade and did a report on it but I'm not sure.

Another book I'd add to the list is The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose. I started reading it last year and had to stop because the material was too engaging for me to do the usual 3-4 books at a time deal.

When I post this I think I'm going to add some more philosophy of science books in, too.

I mispoke about Road to Reality. I should have said "demanding" rather than "engaging." The book has practice problems in it to help you learn the math and science - I had planned on working out the problems - graded easy, intermediate, and difficult. They all seemed fairly difficult to me despite having once been decent at calculus based physics.

It's amazing how quickly that stuff goes. I aced my first semester of calculus a couple years ago (I even helped proofread a few chapters of this text) but I'd be lucky if I could find the limit of a function today.

I picked up Soul Made Flesh again. I'm six chapters in, and came across this sentence that I'm not happy with: "Boyle was impressed by the way that a dead man's nails could keep growing for months, long after the rational soul had left his body." (p. 144)

Sure, that's what Boyle *thought* he was seeing, but Zimmer doesn't note that this is a myth.

I was in the library today to return a book and could not resist checking out a copy of Zimmer's Microcosm that was featured on the New Books shelf.

I also noticed that my library has a new service that allows you do check out on-line editions of books which you can then burn onto cds. I'm hoping they eventually get plenty of public domains books available this way. I jogged my way through Plato's Republic on my IPod earlier this year.

Beak of the Finch by Jonathan WeinerChance in the House of Fate by Jennifer AckermanFads and Fallacies in the Name of Science by Martin GardnerGuns, Germs and Steel by Jared DiamondJust Six Numbers by Martin ReesReinventing Darwin by Niles EldredgeThe Dinosaur Heresies by Robert BakkerThe God Particle by Leon Lederman